


Asymmetry

by HenryMercury



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: (the beginnings of), Family Feels, Fire Nation Royal Family, Gen, Post-War, Prison, Redemption, Siblings, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-31
Updated: 2015-08-31
Packaged: 2018-04-18 05:31:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4693865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HenryMercury/pseuds/HenryMercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Azula is fifteen. She is not Ozai, and luckily for her Zuko is not Iroh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asymmetry

**Author's Note:**

> I spend a lot of time thinking about these lines: http://henrymercury.tumblr.com/post/127990613557/mrfozzilla-brbbl00dbending-one-of-the-few

_"Will what is moulded say to its moulder, “Why have you made me like this?” Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use?"_

_Romans 9:20-21_

_-_

On his first day back in the Fire Nation capital Iroh sits in the garden and meditates amongst the fire lilies, which are almost ready to bloom. He has the ingredients for his favourite teas brought to him there. He thanks each of the servants who attends him with a kind smile, and recalls a time—a long, darkened stretch of time all throughout his youth—when he did not do so. His younger self: never so gleefully wicked as Ozai, but not a kind or gracious man either. A man who was as proud in war as he was raised to be; who laughed at the thought of burning Ba Sing Se to the ground.

The forces that had shaped him into who he was now had been as rough as the sea, pounding at stony cliffs until they eroded, smoothing jagged glass into beautiful jewels. It is a process that must be looked back upon with thankfulness even if he can never forgive the world for inflicting it upon him. At the time, all that washing and smoothing had simply felt like drowning, drowning for days and years without end. Iroh hums the little soldier boy tune softly as he pours his next cup of fragrant tea.

He remembers returning to this very palace after his loss at Ba Sing Se only to find another war. Lu Ten gone, that spilt blood still fresh on Iroh's hands, and instead of grieving a lost grandchild, Iroh's father had ordered the death of a second one.

"Ozai must learn respect,"Azulon had said in his creaky old voice when Iroh urged him to retract the order. "He trivialises the death of your son, your heir. I am punishing him out of _compassion_ for you."

"Are you certain in your choice of words, Father?" Iroh had asked him. "Because I am not. I can see no compassion in treating the wound of a lost son with the blood of a murdered nephew!"

"Ozai is not a man who learns except by pain."

"I know, Father—but _whose pain_ will this really cause?"

Iroh still remembers the way tears welled up, closing his throat in that moment. He had felt weaker than ever before, shamed and desperate and broken. Now it is one of the first moments in his life he looks back on with some measure of pride.

Azulon had dismissed him as the tears began to dribble down his cheeks. In the high heat of the flaming throne room they almost boiled against his skin, drying quickly into sticky tracks.

"You are unwell, Iroh," his father had told him. "Go back to your chambers and collect yourself. It is not too late to produce another heir."

"There can never be another like Lu Ten," Iroh spoke in unsteady fragments, only just pulled together into words, sentences; a clumsy patchwork. "And there can never be another like Zuko. I beg you to think on your so-called wisdom, Father. Death is no teacher."

Iroh thinks of Avatar Aang as the afternoon sun grows pale and a slight chill sets in. His bending keeps him warm, of course, although sometimes he likes to let the cold seep into him slightly just to feel the sensation of it. It is an awakening feeling. Iroh thinks of Aang and the wisdom he had shown, knowing as just a boy what Iroh had only learned as a grown man. That death is no teacher. Iroh thinks it could have been wonderful to be raised an Air Nomad, absorbing such lessons of peace from birth.

Of course Iroh's forebears would eradicate such wisdom from the world. That is the clay from which Iroh was moulded.

It is because of Aang's wisdom that Iroh is here in the capital now—the Jasmine Dragon left temporarily in the capable hands of Piandao. Because Ozai is alive, Iroh is here to see him. He is not sure he has found the words to say to him yet, however.

"Uncle." Zuko, newly crowned Fire Lord Zuko, of whom Iroh is indescribably proud, strides through the garden towards him. "You've been out here all day. You haven't moved."

Iroh sighs. "I know, my nephew. It is hard to move towards a destination such as mine."

Zuko looks at him sympathetically. "I understand; I'm on my way to visit Azula now. I thought maybe you could start off by paying her a visit. Work your way up to seeing Father."

Iroh is afraid to see his niece, but he will not tell Zuko to go alone when Zuko has asked for his company. He allows his nephew to lead him on a walk through the beautiful gardens to the far less beautiful prison. They make their way leisurely, perhaps hesitantly, Iroh stopping to point out exquisite flowers or bushes that catch his eye as they go until the plants run out and are replaced by flat faces of stone. Beyond Iroh's botanical commentary, their conversation is sparse and stilted, both their minds on the difficult interaction ahead.

Azula is as Iroh has never seen her. Wretched is, to some degree, the word he's looking for, but it doesn't say all that he needs it to. Neither does broken. _Humbled_ , he thinks, suggests more acceptance than he can see in her darting, bloodshot eyes, whenever her jagged fringe is not obscuring them. She reminds Iroh in a way of the person he'd pretended to be while he was imprisoned, but she is not so dumbly animalistic as that, grunting and lapping scraps up off the ground. No; Azula sits tall, lips curl back from her teeth in the snarl of a wolf with a broken leg, biting out aggression to try and scare away a fight it would surely lose.

"Well, if it isn't our fuddy-duddy uncle," she observes from the corner. "Why won't you both just leave me alone?"

"You're my sister."

"And how often I've wished that weren't true."

"I used to wish the same."

"What changed your mind, Zuzu? Do you think I'll offer you advice on how to fill a role you're clearly not equipped for? Do you really think I'd do anything besides finish the job I started when I set out to kill you?"

To Iroh's surprise, Zuko's silence is patient, not speechlessly enraged. He has matured so much in his short time as Fire Lord. Such a position exterminates innocence fast.

"You should kill me and be done with it," Azula tells her brother with a bitter bark of a laugh. "Part of me's surprised you haven't already—although the rest feels it only makes sense, what with how _weak_ you've always been."

"I won't end your life," Zuko insists. "And it's not because I'm weak. It's because I'm strong enough to have mercy, like Avatar Aang."

"Leaving me to rot isn't mercy."

"That's why I won't do that. I want to help you, Azula."

"Then you're a fool, just like Uncle. I'll put a knife in your back, Zuko, I promise you." Azula spits at him.

"I guess that's enough for today," Zuko says, and turns to leave. Iroh follows him, watches as the proud set of his shoulders buckles the moment he's out of Azula's sight.

"It's okay, Zuko," he puts an arm around his nephew—so tall, now, made taller still by the large royal hairpin jutting up from his topknot. "No matter what she says, she can't hurt you anymore."

Zuko shakes his head. "That isn't what I'm worried about."

"Then what?"

"It's just... she always had the upper hand. She always won, and her goal was so often to hurt me that I had to put all my energy into just staying alive. She always had so much confidence, and I never had the time or the chance to see through a single crack in it. But now... Now all I can think about is how she's my little sister. How I've done this to her."

Iroh shakes his head. "Zuko, this was not your doing. Azula brought this on herself."

Zuko quickens his stride so that Iroh's hand slips off his shoulder. "She's fifteen years old, Uncle. When I was fifteen I was lucky—even if I thought the opposite at the time. I had experiences and guidance that took me off the path that would otherwise have led me to exactly where Azula is now. You saw how much my struggles changed me."

"Like the turbulent ocean, turning jagged glass into beautiful pebbles, clear and bright and colourful," Iroh muses aloud.

Zuko takes a moment to comprehend, and then answers, "Yes. Like that. Except nobody ever threw Azula into that ocean, so she never learned how to swim."

-

Iroh goes to visit his brother alone. Ozai sits, hunched, in his own filth and yet his presence is still palpable, that crackling air of deranged pride and unpredictable violence. The same things Iroh had always seen in Azula, at least until his and Zuko's visit to her cell the previous evening.

"Tell me, brother, do you feel _any_ remorse?" Iroh asks, setting his pot of tea on the floor and then sitting cross-legged behind it, facing Ozai through the bars of his cage.

Ozai looks at the tea and laughs. "You are still as weak and foolish as ever."

Iroh heats one cup of tea with firebending as his brother watches. He holds it up for Ozai to see, an offering, but one which is not welcomed. Iroh lifts the tea to his own lips, then.

"You don't deserve the flame," Ozai says bitterly. "You, a coward who uses it to warm water, not to strive for any kind of greatness."

Iroh inhales the calming scent of jasmine, breathes it in long and deep.

"Sure smells like greatness to me," he grins, then continues more seriously; "You do not understand the true blessing of fire. To you it is nothing more than a powerful weapon."

"You say that like there's any better thing it could be."

Iroh sighs. Speaking to Ozai is like speaking to a brick; clay fired so comprehensively that there can be no changing its shape anymore.

Ozai's face looks older now that its lines and wrinkles are shaded in with dirt. Iroh spots several dark grey hairs amongst the sleek black. He has been very aware of his own aging, but strangely he had not thought to consider his younger brother's until now. Ozai too is becoming an old man. Old and set in his ways.

"Zuko is doing a wonderful job as Fire Lord," Iroh tells Ozai as he leaves. "He is already restoring peace and harmony to the four nations. Healing the many scars you left on the world."

He is more conscious of Azula's youth after that. He takes the long route back from Ozai's cell, through the underground corridors winding slowly up to the surface. This path takes him past Azula's cell. He means to visit her again, but as he approaches he hears a sound. A voice, navigating a tune that is slightly too high in places, straining under it and cracking like glass. The lower passages, however—those glow, sweet and smooth like honey. Iroh searches his memory for a time he might have heard Azula sing, even as a small child, but he cannot think of such an occasion.

She had never been open to him the way that Zuko had been. She disposed of every gift he offered her and turned away when he attempted to make conversation. The only thing she would perform in front of him was firebending, her katas always as aggressive as they were advanced. Yet Iroh is sure that Azula did not learn to sing like this in prison. She must have been singing for years to build up this amount of skill and repertoire. He stands outside and listens, fighting the urge to sing harmony lines to the tunes that he is familiar with, in case she should hear him and stop. If he had ever known she sang as a child perhaps they could have sung together.

Iroh listens to Azula's singing until he is very late for the lunch he promised to take with Zuko. Even once he arrives in the dining hall his mind wanders back to the prison, music bouncing off the inside of his skull the way it had those hard stone walls.

Sleep is struggling to take him that night when at last he realises what bothers him about the songs: Ozai never cared at all for music. Ozai actively hated music. Growing up, he put his boot through every pipa Iroh ordered. Once he has had the thought that there must be more to Azula than her father's influence, it seems ludicrous, _criminal_ , that he has not had it earlier. Iroh has been making assumptions for years about a girl it turns out he barely knows, filling in blanks about Zuko's sibling with knowledge of his own. Shame blankets him until finally sleep takes over.

-

 _She's crazy and she needs to go down._ The memory of these words, his own words, weighs so heavily on Iroh that he goes to Azula and confesses them to her. She laughs at him, a nasty laugh, and then tells him that she might almost have respected him if he'd been able to stand by such a decisive attack.

"I didn't know you had it in you to condemn and kill a child," she muses, and Iroh's blood runs cold, all the heat drained out of him, all the life-force. His body sags and seizes in visceral discomfort as he recognises pieces of people he does not want to be like forged into his own skeleton, hardened there, beyond reformation or replacement.

He would have killed her, he knows, if he'd been given a clear shot.

"I'm so sorry," he says, not looking up at her, bowing his head instead.

"Don't be," she snaps. "Your apologies are pathetic. You wallow as though you're the only one ever to have done something regrettable."

"What do you regret, Azula?"

She does not speak, but he finds that her silence is quite telling. It represents the emphatic absence of a snarky response or any kind of threat. Once, he's sure, Azula would have told him that no one imbued with the divine right to rule had any reason to regret their actions. She was, he thinks, always such an excellent liar because she never knew enough of the truth.

She glares at him with brows that arch the way his brother's do, sharp as blades. She tosses her hair back over her shoulder like a sheet of rich black fabric, glossy as Ozai's has always been. But there are no flecks of grey in it yet. Azula is fifteen. She is not Ozai, and luckily for her Zuko is not Iroh. Some people are beyond repair—but it is not always easy to tell which ones. It is the hardest thing of all to accept the cracks in a mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also henrymercury on [tumblr](http://henrymercury.tumblr.com/); come talk to me :)


End file.
